Rocchi’s Retro Rental: “Yippie-Ki-Yay, Mother-of-My-Children!”

Go ahead, do a double-take when you read that year of release for Die Hard; I’ll still be here when you’re done shaking your head in amazement. Yes, it’s been nearly 20 years since John McClane (Bruce Willis) sauntered shoeless into our lives, and we get him back this week in the hideously titled Live Free or Die Hard.

(I mean: Really, 20th Century Fox Marketing? That’s all you got? Really?) I don’t necessarily feel a need to watch every Part One of a series before seeing Part Two, Three or Four in a theater, but the recently and not coincidentally released Die Hard Collection box set from Fox did fortuitously arrive in the mail a few weeks ago — and, come on, it’s Die Hard.

There’s an old saying among actors about how you have the energy to play King Lear when you’re young, but the understanding to really perform the part when you’re old. Something similar happened for me with Die Hard — a movie I recall loving unabashedly as a teen thanks to a combination of airtight structure, hair-trigger timing and sheer giddy bravado actually has gotten a little deeper, a little richer, a little more character-driven as I’ve gotten older. Of course, it’s still a block-rocking action film, but many of the things my callow boy’s eye glided over on their way to the next fight scene have come a bit more clearly into focus, now. And no one’s going to confuse Die Hard with Altman or Bergman or Ozu — but it’s still got some complex notes of flavor going on under the initial sugar rush.

Die Hard, as you’ll recall, was a monster success — it pretty much redefined the action film for a while, with variation after variation after variation coming at us from Hollywood. But it wasn’t just a monster success due to the idea of a single setting, and it wasn’t just a monster success thanks to a likable everyman hero wisecracking and wincing through his wounds as he killed an entire building’s worth of bad guys. Die Hard was a monster success because it was a rarity in action cinema: A movie where character mattered. John McClane doesn’t just kill an entire building’s worth of bad guys because he has to: John McClane kills an entire building’s worth of bad guys as an act of contrition towards his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). She’s in danger; he has to get her out. He did her wrong by not following her career to L.A.; now, he’s going to do right by her, up to and including rescuing her from the clutches of Hans Gruber.

And Hans Gruber (memorably played by Alan Rickman, with immmmmmposssssibly arrrrrrch and rounddd vocal tonesssss) is another reason to praise Die Hard. There’s a basic principle of storytelling Hollywood often forgets in action films — namely, your hero is only as tough as the villain he takes on. This is why, to contrast Die Hard with another ’80s blockbuster, the 1989 Batman film is an unforgivable piece of gorgeous-yet-hollow set design that’s useless as entertainment: Because no one wants to spend an entire movie building up to a fight between a young, fit hero wearing body armor and old, fat Jack Nicholson in a checkered suit. That’s not a fight worth caring about. But Rickman’s Gruber — smooth, swift, smart and deadly — is both the opposite of Willis’ earthy, plain-guy McClane and entirely similar. McClane is good at improvising; so, in one of the movie’s best scenes, is Gruber.

And a final thing to appreciate about Die Hard — which grows more and more notable to me as years pass and trailers offer us movie moments that look like they were ripped from dull, expensive videogames — is that it predates digital effects, and thank heavens for that. That’s not to say it doesn’t have great special effects — it does — but rather that those great special effects are old-school practical ones — miniatures, optical composites, green-screen stuff — and not the clicking, clacking computer-crafted hollow spectacles we’ve come to associate with summer. The trailer for Live Free or Die Hard has several moments where, gazing at the screen watching it, I have to look down to be sure there’s not an Xbox 360 controller in my hands, as pixel-crafted vehicles float around weightlessly and expensively. Director John McTiernan may not have had the best career as of late, but he knew exactly what he was doing with Die Hard — it’s the very model of a modern major action film, and while the passage of nearly 20 years has changed the world around Die Hard (Remember when terrorists were mostly fictional plot elements in large-scale films and not fictional excuses for invading other countries?), the film itself endures. I’m hopeful about Live Free or Die Hard — the dirty secret of the film criticism business is that, secretly, most real critics actually want every film to be good — but, even if it isn’t, to paraphrase another reluctant, hardscrabble hero of the American cinema, we’ll always have Nakatomi Plaza.